Regular readers of Republic Heritage know that I have narrowed my choice of GOP candidate to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. I have rejected Ron Paul for several reasons but I have not detailed them here because of my respect and friendship with my fellow Republic Heritage blogger, Michael, who is a very dedicated Ron Paul supporter.

I feel so strongly against Mitt Romney that if he is the nominee I will not vote in the general election because I truly believe a vote for Romney is a vote for Obama, therefore, it will not matter who wins the election. Both men have signed socialized medicine into law and both continue to support it although Obama seems to be more politically savvy in this regard. Romney constantly defends his socialized medicine law even to the electorate that is opposed to it and Obama never talks about it because he knows most Americans do not want it.

Unfortunately, it appears that Florida will choose Romney as their pick for presidential nominee today but there are still 46 states that can reject him and make their choice for either Gingrich or Santorum.

Jeffrey Lord makes a very strong case about progressivism in both parties in his recent article (see below) in The American Spectator. This primary fight is, once again, the fight Ronald Reagan waged in the 1970's and 1980's. Reagan won that battle and I sincerely hope conservatives win the battle today because if we lose, America will forever be fundamentally transformed.

Ford Declares Reagan Can't Win"-- Headline in The New York Times, March 1, 1980

Yet still more mush from the wimps.

To borrow a famous Reagan phrase: "Well, there they go again."

Somewhere an exasperated Gipper is doubtless shaking his head.

The war between conservatives and the Republican Establishment -- and make no mistake, this is a war -- is on once more.

The people who brought the GOP losing candidates from Dewey to Dole are at it again.

Last week's assault on Newt Gingrich -- with various Romney supporters seriously and deceptively trying to tell unwitting voters that Gingrich was never really a real Reagan ally -- in reality has nothing to do with Newt Gingrich at all.

The attack on Gingrich's Reagan credentials, by the way, which I discussed here, backfired badly on the Romney forces. They were quickly dropped when:

• Reagan's White House political director and campaign manager Ed Rollins crisply dismissed them, Rollins saying that Gingrich in the Reagan-era was "one of the most important players and most loyal to Ronald Reagan."

• Another video surfaced of Nancy Reagan saying, "Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt"

• Last but certainly not least, Michael Reagan spoke up, pointedly ending the entire idiotic line of attack. Said Ronald Reagan's son:

I am deeply disturbed that supporters of Mitt Romney are claiming that Newt Gingrich is not a true Reaganite and are even claiming that Newt was a strong critic of my father.

Recently I endorsed Newt Gingrich for president because I believe that Newt is the only Republican candidate who has both consistently backed the conservative policies that my father championed and the only Republican that will continue to implement his vision.

Most media coverage of last Thursday's GOP debate has focused on the war of words fought by the two front runners, but the crucial exchange of the evening didn't occur between Gingrich and Romney. The most telling moment of the debate was the latter's response to Rick Santorum's eloquent explanation of Obamacare's importance to the GOP's strategy in the general election and why giving Romney the nomination would be tantamount to surrendering the high ground on health reform: "Folks, we can't give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom." The former Massachusetts governor responded with the usual rote talking points, which Santorum vehemently rejected. Romney then uttered the most revealing words of the debate: "First of all, it's not worth getting angry about."

Most Republican voters, and more than a few independents, would disagree. Romney apparently didn't notice that the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up at the nation's capitol to protest the impending passage of Obamacare were pretty angry. In fact, after the law was passed over their vehement objections, a significant portion of the voters were so outraged by the back-room skullduggery used to pass "reform" that many Democrats were actually afraid to hold town hall meetings and face their own constituents during the run-up to the 2010 midterms. Moreover, despite the many whoppers told by the President's accomplices in the media about the "anti-incumbent mood" of the electorate, the drubbing the Democrats received in that election was obviously driven by voter indignation about being force-fed Obamacare.

And the anger remains. That is why Obama's recent State of the Union address contained only three references to his "signature domestic achievement." This is, as Michael Barone puts it, "the strongest evidence possible" that the President sees Obamacare as "a millstone around the neck of his campaign." Thus, he and his minions will not have missed the significance of Romney's prissy rebuke of Santorum's passionate plea not to "give this issue away." They no doubt recognized it as a Freudian slip betraying Romney as a man without real convictions, and realize that this is the source of his countless flip-flops. In the art of politics, as in the art of war, the key to victory is knowledge of one's enemy. Having cut their political teeth in Chicago, the President's men know a trimmer when they see one and what it takes to defeat him.

The only real difference between Romney and Obama's long-ago-vanquished opponents is that the Chi-town pols were less amateurish. Romney's reversals of position have been so frequent and transparently self-serving that a moderately intelligent preschooler could see through them. Health reform is Exhibit A. When running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, Romney represented himself as the champion of a free market health system: "I do not believe in a government takeover of the healthcare system." After becoming Governor of Massachusetts, however, his position changed so radically that he signed a health reform law that later became the model for Obamacare. Now, he claims to oppose Obama's version of the plan, though the two laws are identical in all important respects.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

I was searching for video of Newt Gingrich unveiling Thomas and stumbled upon this instead. I had forgotten this had happened but it is a very interesting video. People that claim Gingrich is not a conservative need to watch this. - Reggie

"Well, look, either you'll have an extremist conservative, be it Gingrich or Santorum, in which case I think it will make a big difference which of the two comes in," says George Soros. "If it's between Obama and Romney, there isn't all that much difference except for the crowd that they bring with them."

What else do you need to finally come to the conclusion that Romney should be utterly rejected as the Republican nominee? George Soros is telling the world what I have been saying here for weeks: Mitt Romney is Obama lite! The men are the same in their philosophy and their goal for America is the same progressive goal.

Do you want to see the complete destruction of America? If you do, then select Mitt Romney because it won't matter who the winner is in November. However, if your desire is to see America begin the long journey of turning back over 100 years of progressivism, reject Romney! - Reggie

I have been trying, as best I can, to sound the alarm about the damage being done by the scorched earth tactics of the Romney campaign and its supporters in the Republican political and media establishments.

The effort long ago left the political realm and has devolved into a collective settling of decades-old communal scores. Romney very adroitly has exploited to his advantage some of the deepest intra-Republican personal and emotional grievances and grudges.

Humiliation, not mere electoral defeat, appears to be the goal. Much as among warring communities in the Middle East and the Balkans, Romney supporters even have sought to deprive Newt of his own history.

This election did not have to turn so destructive. As in 2008, going negative was a conscious decision by the Romney campaign in response to an opponent rising on a positive message in Iowa. The problem, it seems, is not with the opponents, but with the way in which Romney runs campaigns.

Mark Levin, who supports Rick Santorum, has been a voice of decency and clarity as to the attacks on Newt.

At Thursday’s CNN Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney won the immigration exchange with Newt Gingrich. But three specific instances again left those who may have been warming to Romney with concern that the former Massachusetts governor may implode against President Barack Obama in the fall. Romney’s camp, earlier in the day, sought to portray Gingrich as someone who was “unhinged” but there is a case to be made that Romney may pose even more of a risk for Republicans in a general election.

Clinton-style trickery with words

Gingrich noted that Romney said he was, in 1992, “donating to the Democrats for Congress and voted for Paul Tsongas in the Democratic primary” and, in 1994, “running against Teddy Kennedy, he said flatly, I don't want to go back to the Reagan-Bush era, I was an independent.”

“Just a short clarification,” Romney jumped in. “I've never voted for a Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot.”

Basically, Romney was technically right because even though the Republicans had a primary in Massachusetts in 1992 (Pat Buchanan versus President George H.W. Bush), there obviously was not a Republican on the Democratic ballot -- that would be impossible -- that he cast.

This slight trickery in wordplay reinforced the notion that he is a typical politician, devoid of core beliefs, willing to say anything, anywhere in order to get elected. It is also the type of thing that drives people outside the beltway nuts and makes them wonder on what other issues has Romney been too clever by half.

Santorum said that if Romney were to face Obama and say that ObamaCare should be repealed, Obama would simply say to Romney, “wait a minute, Governor. You just said that top-down government-run medicine in Massachusetts works well.”

Santorum said that people in Massachusetts are not willing to pay a cheaper fine and get on health insurance instead of paying for more expensive health insurance, which resulted because of the Massachusetts mode.

Santorum added: “Folks, we can't give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom.”

I am beginning to think that the nature and level of attacks being launched by Mitt Romney against Newt Gingrich, which he would surely use against any conservative threatening his nomination, are going to make it very difficult for Romney to unite the different factions of the GOP and the conservative movement behind his candidacy should he win the nomination. While I have said that I would vote for Rick Santorum, I am appalled at the "anything goes" assault on Gingrich. See here:

Romney is not a conservative in the traditional sense, and he has a record of big-government Republicanism. Even many years after the success of the Reagan administration, he sought to distance himself from Reagan and the GOP, self-identifying as a progressive and independent. Thus, he resorts to spending multi-millions of dollars trashing his opponents, rather than providing thoughtful arguments on conservatism and constitutionalism. Lest we forget, it was Gingrich who was trying to run a positive campaign and who offered to debate Romney one-on-one, asking Romney to stop with the millions in unanswered ads attacking him. Romney declined. I have no doubt that Romney would do the same thing to Santorum if Santorum was rising in the polls, albeit on different issues.

I have said that Romney is in many ways Richard Nixon, and that Romney would not successfully lead efforts to repeal Obamacare but, in fact, would grow the federal government in many respects. Romney's advisor, former senator Norm Coleman, has now said as much. That is Romney's record. Despite having been a businessman, he was not a defender of free market capitalism while governor. Romneycare is, as Santorum pointed out, a top-down government health care system with an individual mandate that is breaking Massachusetts' treasury and destroying private health insurance. It is a disaster. Romney also backed cap-and-trade and TARP (as did Gingrich).

My great fear is, however, that he is the weakest candidate who can face Obama and will go into the general election with a fractured base, thanks to his own character flaws, which are now on display, and his tactics of personal destruction. Moreover, while Romney can swamp his Republican opponents by 3 to 1 or more in every state with his spending advantage, Barack Obama will be raising more and spending more to beat him in the general election, meaning Romney's financial advantage will be non-existent.

We better start paying a lot more attention to holding the House of Representatives and winning the Senate with a bunch of solid conservatives. I have spent a year on my radio show identifying and interviewing these candidates, and will continue to do so.

DESOTO, Fla. — Rick Santorum's 3-year old daughter has been hospitalized in Philadelphia, his campaign said Saturday.

"Rick and his wife Karen are admitting their daughter Bella to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia this evening," Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement.

The reason for the hospitalization was not provided.

Santorum's Saturday campaign schedule was canceled, and he was forced to miss an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.

Late Sunday morning, in a media advisory the campaign said Santorum would participate in two tele-town hall meetings in the evening. The candidate's eldest daughter Elizabeth Santorum was also scheduled to attend a rally in Sarasota, FL joined by the Duggar family, stars of a reality show, Sunday afternoon.

Santorum had been taking a break from campaigning in Florida and had a Saturday fundraiser scheduled in Washington before news broke of his daughter's illness. He had been due to return to Florida to attend church Sunday morning in Miami before heading to a rally in Sarasota, Fla. and a dinner in Punta Gorda, Fla.

I lived in Tennessee in 1994 when the Republicans won the majority in the House after forty years of Democrat rule and I voted for Fred Thompson for Senate that year. He was a citizen legislator that served a few years and then left Washington to return to the private sector. I have no doubt he would still be in the U.S. Senate if he had chosen to run again in 2004.

I also remember watching C-SPAN, live in January 1995, as Newt Gingrich was sworn in as Speaker of the House. One of the first things he did, as Speaker, was to create Thomas. Named for Thomas Jefferson, it is the website where the public is able to find every piece of legislation online. I saw Gingrich unveil Thomas on C-SPAN and wondered why no one had thought of doing this before.

Gingrich is not perfect but he is a visionary and an agent of change. Instead of these candidates fighting in the arena of ideas Romney and his surrogates have decided on a scorched earth campaign because they know he can not win on the merits. This decision is a huge mistake and Romney will reap what he has sown. - Reggie

Saturday, January 28, 2012

This is a very fair and insightful article about Newt and I really recommend that everyone takes the time to read it. My favorite part is when one of my past, childhood football heroes, Steve Largent is mentioned!

- Michael

Yeah, yeah. I know. Newt Gingrich had a lousy week and will probably lose the Florida primary on Tuesday. But for those tempted to once again predict the speedy collapse of his campaign, consider yourselves forewarned. I’ve known this guy long enough to realize that the only three species destined to survive a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches, Cher and Newton Leroy Gingrich.

I first met Gingrich 17 years ago at a Destin, Fla., fundraiser held in my honor a few weeks after Newt declared that I was too conservative to win the general election. But after I won the primary against the moderate woman he anointed, there he was in Florida looking supremely bored and a little put out that he was having to sit through another politician’s speech.
Read more>>

By now everyone has read news and commentary coverage of some of the most exciting debate moments in recent history: the exchange that took place between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney concerning Romneycare. And perhaps many of you, like me, watched the debate and saw the exchange as it happened. If you did, I’m guessing those among you who are conservative found yourselves cheering for Santorum as he took it to Romney on what is surely the most dangerous aspect of a possible Romney candidacy—Romneycare.

It’s dangerous for the reasons Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh have indicated by predicting that Obama can’t wait to face Romney because Romney WILL NOT be able to go after Obamacare with any moral integrity. As soon as he brings it up Obama will just say: “All I know is that while you were Gov. in Massachusetts, you implemented the plan we followed in designing our Health Care reforms.” And that will end the debate on Obamacare.

Santorum proved this during the debate in Florida on Thursday night, by explaining that just as Obamacare requires everyone to buy health insurance or pay a fine to the government, so too Romneycare requires Massachusetts citizens to do the same or pay a fine to the state. In other words, both plans carry a personal mandate which forces citizens to buy healthcare (or pay a fine) whether they want to or not. And when Romney responded to Santorum by saying he was proud of what they’d done in Massachusetts and the people of Massachusetts seemed happy with it too, Santorum offered a foretaste of the way Obama is going to take Romney apart on this issue. Said Santorum:

“What Gov. Romney just said is that government-run, top-down medicine is working pretty well in Massachusetts and he supports it. Now, think about what that means.”

Romney’s position here is simply indefensible, and although Santorum is the only one to call him out so clearly to this point, Santorum will certainly not be the last. And this is why Santorum kept saying, “We cannot give the issue of healthcare away in this election.” Dan Riehl made this point clear in his post on Big Government January 27, when he quoted Paul Begala as saying that on the issue of Romneycare v. Obamacare, “Mitt still doesn’t have a straight answer. Rick Santorum skillfully dissected Romney on the topic. If Romney is the GOP nominee, you can be sure Barack Obama will do the same.”

Which brings me to my central point: Namely, that for all the good Santorum did with his line of questions and his relentless regurgitation of the facts against Romney, he still passed on his chance to throw the knock-out punch.

YouTube description: In the Weekly Republican Address, Florida Senator Marco Rubio explains the failures of the Obama administration. He contrasts those with the promise of America that he and Republicans believe in, if the government stops doing the wrong things.

Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:

“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”

I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.

The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.

Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the assembled political class.

An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5 trillion.

Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.

The so-called “Buffett Rule” is indicative not so much of “common sense” as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. Obama can sacrifice the virgin daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending and the debt gods will barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch of acknowledgement. The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt — a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.

Democrats already know one issue upon which they have potential GOP nominee, Mitt Romney at a severe disadvantage, as Paul Begala points out: RomneyCare versus ObamaCare.

After 19 debates Mitt still doesn’t have a straight answer. Rick Santorum skillfully dissected Romney on the topic. If Romney is the GOP nominee, you can be sure Barack Obama will do the same.

Appearing to have been stuck in, you’re angry mode, a tactic Romney is deploying to target Newt Gingrich, it was all he seemed to have as a fall back when very effectively pressed on the subject by Rick Santorum in last night’s debate.

“We cannot give the issue of healthcare away in this election,” Santorum declared, striking a resonance with conservatives everywhere.

Based upon various Twitter accounts, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh picked up on the topic this morning, stressing the importance of the exchange between Santorum and Romney. Liberal blogs and outlets such as Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post are picking up on it with video, as is The Hill, among others.

Words cannot express how opposed I am to Mitt Romney. I am still undecided about voting for Gingrich or Santorum but Romney is completely unacceptable. He is not the man he wants us to believe him to be. - Reggie

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

I am sadly too familiar with these tactics because they were used against the GOP ticket in 2008. The left seeks to single someone out and destroy his or her record and reputation and family using the media as a channel to dump handpicked and half-baked campaign opposition research on the public. The difference in 2008 was that I was largely unknown to the American public, so they had no way of differentiating between the lies and the truth. All of it came at them at once as “facts” about me. But Newt Gingrich is known to us – both the good and the bad.

We know that Newt fought in the trenches during the Reagan Revolution. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, Newt was among a handful of Republican Congressman who would regularly take to the House floor to defend Reagan at a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News or talk radio or conservative blogs to give any balance to the liberal mainstream media. Newt actually came at Reagan’s administration “from the right” to remind Americans that freer markets and tougher national defense would win our future. But this week a few handpicked and selectively edited comments which Newt made during his 40-year career were used to claim that Newt was somehow anti-Reagan and isn’t conservative enough to go against the accepted moderate in the primary race. (I know, it makes no sense, and the GOP establishment hopes you won’t stop and think about this nonsense. Mark Levin and others have shown the ridiculousness of this.) To add insult to injury, this “anti-Reagan” claim was made by a candidate who admitted to not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan days. You can’t change history. We know that Newt Gingrich brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s. We know it because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him, let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque re-writing of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 that didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

I spoke up before the South Carolina primary to urge voters there to keep this primary going because I have great concern about the GOP establishment trying to anoint a candidate without the blessing of the grassroots and all the needed energy and resources we as commonsense constitutional conservatives could bring to the general election in order to defeat President Obama. Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this. Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

As I said in my speech in Iowa last September, the challenge of this election is not simply to replace President Obama. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country. We truly need sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic, though it’s becoming clearer that the old guard wants anything but that. That is why we should all be concerned by the tactics employed by the establishment this week. We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary. So, one must ask, who are they really running against?

- Sarah Palin

The article below sets the record straight on some of the poison thrown on Gingrich in the last few days and really goes to the heart of what Sarah Palin has written:

JERUSALEM — Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Jim Pethokoukis spotlights a new Health Affairs study on how Romneycare laid the foundation for Obamacare, and what it portends for the federal health insurance scene. In short: Expanded government coverage, higher taxpayer costs. Read here for details and analysis. His conclusion:

The authors conclude that based on the Romneycare experience, Obamacare will improve coverage and not kill employer-based insurance, but containing costs will be a “considerable challenge.” That is probably the avenue Romney should use to a) attack Obamacare and b) present his own national health reform. But this study will perpetuate the meme that Romneycare was the prototype for Obamacare. Santorum hammered Romney on this point at the last debate more effectively than any other candidate throughout this campaign season, probably because he understands the issue better than his rivals. We’ll see if he or Gingrich follows up tonight.

The Obama administration may have relied much more heavily on Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare legislation as a blueprint for Obamacare than was previously believed.

White House visitor logs obtained by NBC News revealed that three of Romney’s healthcare advisers had up to a dozen meetings with senior administration officials, including one in the Oval Office presided over by President Barack Obama.

“They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,” MIT economist and Romney healthcare adviser Jon Gruber told NBC.

And back in September, I noted the analysis by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute showing the depths of the economic damage that Romneycare did in the Bay State.

Honestly, I haven't seen venom like this toward a Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan ran. I thought the Republican establishment would try to destroy Newt Gingrich after he won South Carolina so decidedly, but even I am surprised at the vitriol and venom being spewed by these elites.

Romney has taken the lead in the Florida polls again and there is a debate on CNN tonight. Gingrich will rise or fall in Florida but I must say this: Mitt Romney is a very dirty campaigner. As much as I want Obama to lose, I do not believe I will be able to vote for Romney if he is the nominee. The man is Obama lite in so many ways and he will say anything to get elected! - Reggie

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I am shocked at the support that Newt is drawing. Since when does someone rise in the polls after blasting a debate moderator about his failed marriages and serial adultery problems? Is this not what brought down Cain's candidacy??? Are we to all beleive that Newt is beyond these problems? Do we want another man in the white house focused on money, power and women? Clinton was enough for me. You people who claim to be conservatives, claim to be moral, claim to love this country please wake up. Don't vote for who think can beat Obama, vote for the man who is the RIGHT choice.

I firmly beleive that if Regan was alive today Gingrich would be the last man he would endorse for president. Newt is mentioned once in a Reagan's diaries saying; "Newt’s ideas would ‘cripple our defense program."

- Michael

Republic Heritage.com

In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.

The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.